


more or less a second chance

by facingthenorthwind (spacegandalf)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Book 4: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Domestic, M/M, On the Run, POV Remus Lupin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-28
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2020-12-14 09:20:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21013430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacegandalf/pseuds/facingthenorthwind
Summary: Going on the run with Sirius was a very stupid idea, but Remus was a Marauder, so of course he went on the run with Sirius. Marauders were full of stupid ideas.





	more or less a second chance

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to K., R. and I. for helping me out with this! Especially to K. for saving me several times over, what a legend. Also shout out to the HP Lexicon’s calendars, if that website ever went down I would never write a canon compliant fic again. Not that this is canon compliant? It is except in the quite significant way in which it is not.
> 
> I am on Team Journey and my prompt is this:  
“We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance."  
-Harrison Ford

“Run away with me.”

Sirius first said it in a cave while Remus was dripping wet from the rain and shivering slightly, standing as close to the fire as he dared. Sirius had sent him an owl (how did he even find one? Remus thought it best not to ask) and, because it may have been twelve years but Sirius was still Sirius and Remus was still Remus, he came as soon as he got the letter.

When Remus didn’t reply immediately, Sirius said, “I mean — I guess… you should stay at Hogwarts, with the teaching, but just for the summer, at least—”

“I’m not returning to Hogwarts,” Remus said, staring into the fire instead of looking at Sirius. “Snape let it slip at breakfast yesterday that I’m a werewolf, so... I resigned.”

“He did _what_? That snivelling little prick, I’ll—”

“No,” Remus said, walking to the other side of the fire to put a hand on Sirius’s arm. “He was right, I was a danger to students and I should never have taken the risk in the first place, it was inexcusable.”

“You had wolfsbane!”

“And missing a single dose made me — made me exactly what I am. A mindless, bloodthirsty beast.”

He still hadn’t looked at Sirius’s face, but Sirius took the choice out of his hands entirely, tipping Remus’s chin up with his hand to force Remus to look into his eyes. He looked furious. “You’re nothing of the sort. It was my fault you missed your dose, and I promise I’ll certainly never be on the Hogwarts grounds again. You’re kind and compassionate and I’m sure you are a wonderful teacher. What did Dumbledore say?”

“He wished me the best and understood my position.”

“He isn’t even going to fight for you? What kind of a — you deserve better than this, Moony.”

Remus gave a small smile. “In a different world, perhaps.”

Sirius still looked troubled, but the anger at least had bled out of him, and he let go of Remus’s chin.

“Run away with me then. We can go to — I don’t know, the West Indies. Somewhere nobody knows our names, so we can lie low until Dumbledore proves my innocence.” This time he sounded a little less manic, but it was a close thing. Remus realised he still had his hand on Sirius’s arm, and pulled away.

“That would be far too dangerous,” Remus said, back to staring into the fire. “You can hide much more effectively by yourself.”

“We’ll be fine,” Sirius said. “You can take your new mutt Snuffles across the Channel with you on the ferry and then we’re free. Well, free to leave Europe immediately, I’d imagine, but the Ministry are useless, we both know that.”

“I couldn’t stay anywhere — I have no wolfsbane now, so I’m a danger to everyone, unless we find some isolated place with a reinforceable basement. Not to mention the fact that people would realise exactly what I am after a few months. If you were just a stray dog you could go anywhere, stay anywhere, it’d be so easy.”

“Easy stopped being an option in 1972,” Sirius said. "I've had twelve years to think about what I would do outside of Azkaban and while this isn't exactly ideal, I think I have enough of a brain left to be able to choose what I do and who I do it with. Run away with me, please."

Remus shivered and tried to convince himself it was still the cold.

"I'll — give me a few days to think about it. I can come back with food tomorrow if you like."

Sirius bared his teeth in something approaching a grin. "I'll be fine."

* * *

Remus asked for the time so he could think without Sirius being so — there. Sirius was distracting, and every time Remus remembered he was alive and out in the world his brain short-circuited, forgetting the year and the circumstances and just remembering moonywormtailpadfootprongs, remembering safety, remembering the wild grin of Sirius after a raid, breathing heavily with the adrenaline slowly draining out of him. Remembering the way that Sirius had once meant home.

He knew he should say no. He should refuse, he should retreat to somewhere isolated and grovel to Dumbledore for some work, any work — and once a month he should lock himself up with the strongest locks he could find and destroy himself until the sun rose.

He _should_, but he didn't want to. He wanted to chase the feeling of having a home again.

He returned to Sirius with a trunk carrying all his possessions three days later. He didn't have many, and the ones which were now useless — his mother's cookbooks, his father's jazz records — were in his vault in Gringotts for safekeeping.

"Where do you want to go?"

* * *

They crossed the Channel with absolutely no problems. It felt at every moment that something was going to come up, that it would all fall through, that aurors would surround them and order them to surrender, but no one did; they were just a tired man and his dog, anonymous.

They had let Buckbeak free in the mountains, satisfied that no one would go looking for him. It would have been impossible to take him anywhere, and he was perfectly capable of looking after himself. 

Sirius had made Remus take a sizeable amount of gold from the Black family vault. (When Remus kept up with the Muggle news it spoke sometimes of the authorities freezing someone’s assets, but of course that would never work in the wizarding world — the goblins of Gringotts refused to be beholden to the authority of the Ministry, so Sirius had been free to retrieve as much gold as he liked as long as he was disguised once he got out of Azkaban). It was clear that Sirius knew that Remus’s vault had mostly possessions in it, not money, and he would have refused if not for the fact that he knew spending the Black family fortune on going on the lam with a werewolf was exactly the kind of thing Sirius relished in.

They began with perhaps not enough ambition. Neither had been anywhere further afield than France, so they had to rely on Muggle transport. It was the longest day of Sirius’s life, he said later, transferring what felt like half a dozen times on various trains from Calais to Denia, and Remus let him pretend that was true. From Denia they went to Ibiza, at Sirius’s suggestion — “I’ve always wanted to go,” he said as they looked at a map of train routes by the light of Remus’s wand in a Calais alleyway. The dream of the West Indies had shrunk considerably as they realised they couldn’t use any Ministry portkeys or the floo network to travel, and dogs did not have the ability to ride on brooms.

“Where are we going to get a werewolf-proof basement?” Remus said. “And we’ll never get our deposit back if we rent.”

“Moony,” Sirius said, and there it was again — between one breath and the next, Remus travelled back in time, back to before everything had gone wrong. He blinked rather more than he needed, and Sirius pointedly did not notice how close he was to crying. “We’re wizards. Of course we’ll get the deposit back.”

Remus made a small noise, holding back all the things he could say to that — they couldn’t cheat some Muggle out of money they rightly deserved, and no amount of magic could stop him hurting someone if the basement wasn’t secure enough, this was a terrible idea, he should go back to the desperately sad ramshackle cottage in Cornwall and continue slowly starving to death — and Sirius, once again, ignored him.

“Why Ibiza?” Remus said instead.

“Sounds fun,” Sirius said, shrugging. “If we’re going to be somewhere, may as well make it somewhere with nice weather and good nightclubs.”

“You are not going to any nightclubs,” Remus said.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I just want to pretend it’s an option.”

“Alright,” Remus said, powerless to stop him in the face of the last twelve years. If Sirius wanted to live vicariously through the existence of Spanish nightclubs, Remus wasn’t going to deny him the chance.

It was difficult enough dealing with the real estate agent even without the whole basement aspect, since Remus’s ability to speak Spanish was almost zero, and he kept lapsing into French accidentally. At last, on the eighth house they saw, he was satisfied with the basement — or rather, he would be satisfied with the basement, once they had the opportunity to reinforce it.

The real estate agent was also clearly suspicious about why they wanted to buy a house having so obviously spent almost no time in Spain, and doubly so that they could pay in cash. A confunding charm stopped her reporting Remus to the authorities, though, and after a trip to buy the materials they would need at a local Muggle hardware store, Sirius finally was able to resume human form.

“Genius idea to buy outright, this way we’ll definitely get our deposit back,” Sirius said with a grin that showed he did actually know how house-buying worked. It had been Sirius’s idea in the first place, of course, so Remus rolled his eyes and got to work putting up blackout curtains as Sirius sat out of sight.

The basement performed admirably the first time it was used — wolfsbane was out of the question, of course, because even if Sirius were skilled enough to make it (something Sirius insisted was true but Remus privately doubted), getting the ingredients would raise far too many eyebrows. Remus had initially tried to insist on going it alone, with Sirius still in human form so he could act quickly if anything went wrong, but Sirius had pointed out that in dog form, he would know even better what was happening, _and_ he would be able to act without worrying about getting bitten. 

It was nothing like running through the Forbidden Forest — Remus had accepted that he would never feel that thrill of freedom again, and Sirius’s ability to stop him hurting himself was limited in the basement. The restrictions on them were both unnatural and jarring, but Remus still came out of it with fewer cuts and bruises than he usually did. It was lovely, too, that Sirius nursed him back to health afterwards, though he wouldn’t admit it. 

They had six weeks of domesticity. If Sirius noticed how Remus blushed as Sirius brushed his hair out of his eyes when he handed him a bowl of soup, he didn’t say anything. And if Remus noticed Sirius looking at his lips perhaps more often than friendship strictly warranted, he also said nothing — this was far too precious to him to dare change the status quo of comfortable, almost surreal friendship. Sirius put his foot down about Remus fretting that he couldn’t find work; what was being descended from a toxic blood supremacist family if he couldn’t keep them both in the manner they were accustomed to (Sirius) or what felt like the height of luxury (Remus) for decades?

Remus tried to argue, but in the end all he could do was insist that this was only until Sirius’s name was cleared. He refused to be a kept man, but working meant taking time off for the full moon meant people realising what he was meant people realising he may have more than one secret to hide, and they couldn’t risk that. He still responded to ads in the Daily Prophet about proof-reading technical documents and once he even landed a short-term contract for some translation work he could do remotely, and then he held his head a little higher and ate a little more than he did other weeks.

It was six weeks almost to the day when that came crashing down. They were on the beach — Sirius liked to splash in the waves and get absolutely covered in sand, which he then tracked all through the house without any regard for Remus, who would be the one to do the hoovering. There were always a few Brits, it seemed, but this time Remus had just set out the towel when he heard someone behind him mention ‘black’, which piqued his interest. It wasn’t paranoia if the Ministry were really out to get them, which they absolutely were.

“He’s disappeared,” a woman was saying, and Remus fought every urge he had to look behind him. “We’ve still got absolutely no clue how he got away in the first place — still looking into how the Dementors failed to keep him in Azkaban — but I can’t believe that he got off Hogwarts grounds without help. Why anyone would want to help a murderer I don’t know.”

“Maybe he forced them,” another woman said. “I don’t think anyone would actually want to.”

“Yeah, maybe,” said the first woman. “I just wish he had more living friends — did quite a number on us by killing them all off before he got caught.”

Remus’s first instinct was to run, but that was absurd — they hadn’t even seen him, most likely. It took all his self-control to gather up his towel and call into the surf, “Snuffles! Here, Snuffles, we’ve got to go.”

Sirius didn’t seem to hear him, and Remus cursed before getting the bottoms of his trousers wet in the surf. He had absolutely no intention of swimming — all his scars would create more questions than he wanted to answer, and he had planned on reading a book while Sirius tired himself out. “Snuffles! Come here, you stupid boy, it’s time to go home.”

Finally, Sirius bounded over, almost bowling Remus over as he rested his paws on his torso. Remus privately cursed the fact that they hadn’t put a collar on him. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got to go. I’ll explain later.”

Sirius, thankfully, dutifully followed him back to the car, shaking himself so Remus got a thorough drenching just before he hopped into the back seat.

“Fuck you,” Remus said without any heat behind it. He was silent until they got back to the house where he locked the door behind him.

“We’ve got to leave,” he said as Sirius returned to human form. “People near me on the beach were talking about how frustrating it was that you killed all your friends before committing mass murder, so they don’t have any leads on where you are now.”

“But… that means they don’t have any leads.”

“And it means there are Ministry employees here! Now! Where either of us could be seen! I have no desire to be remembered as one of your friends.”

“Tell us how you really feel,” Sirius said, and Remus winced.

“Not like that, I mean—”

“I know how you mean, Moony.”

“It’ll take too long to wait around before this house sells; do you have enough money to write this one off?”

“Depends where we’re going, I guess. Can’t afford a Tokyo mansion or anything, but sure. And all we need to do is wait until Dumbledore clears me, then we can come back and sell this one. Or keep it as a summer home. I was getting quite fond of the beaches here.”

“Sure,” Remus said, distracted. “The faster we pack the faster we can get to the airport, we need to get out of Europe completely — where — ugh, this is what comes of going to a school that doesn’t teach geography.”

“There’ll be maps at the airport, probably. I just finished unpacking last week, bloody hell,” Sirius said, wandering around the house collecting the things he’d put out so that it would finally begin to feel like a home — a little trinket they’d bought at a shop near the beach, a perfumed hand cream, a snowglobe of a beach scene. Remus was surprised Sirius was so into buying this kind of nonsense until he remembered that he’d spent a third of his life in a cell with no possessions at all.

It took a depressingly short time before they were at the ferry back to the mainland, stopping at a library on the way to look at an atlas. They had landed on ‘an island somewhere warm’ and ended up, after considerable questioning of airport staff, on their way to Papeete. Hopefully this time they wouldn’t find themselves a few feet away from someone trying to hunt Sirius down.

Finding somewhere to live went much more smoothly given Remus’s French was miles better than his Spanish, though it still took a lot of house hunting before he found a basement he was satisfied with. They avoided the obvious touristy spots, having learnt their lesson, but it meant they were almost completely cut off from the world they knew. It was a little unsettling to not know where the local wizarding community was, but Remus was used to living mostly in the Muggle world — Muggles, at least, would only fire him for missing work too often, not because they knew he was a werewolf.

Remus’s parents wrote to him often, though they had no idea about Sirius. It was the only connection they had to the UK, since neither of them wanted the potential attention that might come from keeping up a subscription to the Daily Prophet on the other side of the world. They worried and missed him, of course, but what was much more important was the little tidbits they gave them, seemingly not comprehending their true value. Dumbledore had hired Mad Eye Moody to replace Remus in the Defence position; there had been a spike in Dark creature cases at Remus’s father’s work. These details spoke of an unrest that Remus and Sirius, on Tahiti, could do absolutely nothing about.

Remus came home from the shops one day to find Sirius writing a letter. An odd choice for a convict on the run, he had to admit. “It’s to Harry,” Sirius said when Remus asked. “I can’t give him the home I promised but I can at least write to him. I wrote to him just before term ended, and he knows not to use my real name and all that, but it’s not like the Ministry is going to be checking all owls that go in and out of the UK. It’d be impossible.”

“I suppose it would,” Remus agreed, although he still felt a stab of anxiety at the prospect of Sirius owling anybody. "What are you writing?" 

"You know, the standard stuff. Sorry I can't do anything about his awful aunt and uncle — did you meet them? I did once, they're singularly horrid people — right up there with some of mine, I reckon."

"No, I didn't — he didn't say anything about it to me." Should Remus have done something different? Asked for more details about his life? He had always trusted that Dumbledore was doing what was best for Harry. He had thought that Harry’s inability to go to Hogsmeade was perhaps some kind of precaution against the supposed murderer after him; was it instead because his aunt and uncle refused to give him a permission slip?

“Do you want to add anything?” Sirius said, startling Remus out of his thoughts. 

“Best not, I don’t want — we shouldn’t have any evidence that I’m with you, I don’t think. Just in case.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” Sirius said, sounding a little dejected. “I just wish—” he began, but stopped, putting his quill down and running his fingers through his hair in a gesture of frustration.

“I’ll just send this off, and then — what were you thinking for dinner?”

* * *

Even though both the houses they’d bought had a spare room, Sirius seemed to sleep in animagus form far more often than in human, usually curled up at the end of Remus’s bed. Multiple times, Remus would wake from nightmares to Sirius licking at his face and then proceeding to clamber on top of him, wuffling softly as Remus clutched at his fur, trying to remember that this was the real world, and not the one he’d just woken from. Usually the dreams involved Sirius somehow — him getting a Kiss from a dementor, as Remus looked on helplessly; a twenty-year-old Sirius dead with a Dark Mark high in the sky above him; Ministry officials knocking at his door to arrest them both.

Once he asked Sirius why he always chose to sleep as a dog, and Sirius shrugged. Remus pressed on: “Is it because you don’t dream when you’re a dog?”

“Of course I dream as a dog,” Sirius said. “But I dream of dog things.”

“The uncomplicated joy of chasing a ball instead of reliving all your friends’ deaths?” Remus said, trying to keep his voice light.

Sirius didn’t answer for a long time, and finally said, “Yeah. Is that what you dream of?”

“Occasionally I dream of the letters Dumbledore is no doubt receiving now that everyone knows he allowed a werewolf to teach children, and one night I had a dream that I got drowned by a grindylow, but yes, mostly. Sometimes it rotates and it’s just one body, but sometimes it’s everyone, and I arrive just too late to stop anything.”

Neither of them were looking at each other, and Remus concentrated very hard on the painting opposite the bed, an island landscape that came with the house, which he would primarily describe as “unremarkable”.

“Do I help?” Sirius asked. “When I wake you up.”

“Of course,” Remus said. “It’s good to remember you’re alive, even if everything else is true.”

* * *

After they left school, the Marauders had all lived together in one large flat, funded jointly by Sirius and James’s inheritances. Those two had absolutely refused to listen to any suggestion from Remus and Peter about paying rent, a problem that was not resolved until one afternoon where James and Sirius finally decided to just sit on top of them until they stopped trying to give them money. 

It was a boring afternoon of being mildly crushed, but Peter broke first by folding an hour in so he could go to the loo. Remus had better bladder control, and lasted three.

When Lily and James got serious (so, about a year later, when it finally became obvious that James was spending more time at Lily’s than at home) he moved out, and the flat was down to three. The war ground on, people died, missions got more fraught, more time-consuming, more hopeless-looking. In mid-1980 Remus began doing the werewolf missions for Dumbledore and was away for weeks at a time; it was then that things began to fall apart. He rarely saw Peter — looking back on it, Peter had a whole other life to live, but at the time he was far too busy trying to stay afloat himself to worry about Peter. Not to mention the fact that every time he was home, as 1981 arrived and relentlessly rolled on, taking with it all their friends in an unending parade of funerals, his suspicions were firmly on Sirius. 

Not at first, of course — they were Marauders, and despite everything he thought that still meant something. But people kept dying, and the pool of suspects grew smaller, and then the Potters and the Longbottoms went into hiding, and then — well, Sirius already had the connections. He hated his family, sure, but they would know where to hit him where it hurt; they would be able to find him with all sorts of dark blood magic. 

It made _sense_. That’s what he kept insisting to himself as he pulled away from Sirius, as Sirius became more hostile in turn. 

They’d both been wrong, in the end.

* * *

They settled into life on the island little by little. Sirius’s French was better than Remus’s, so sometimes they would read books or the newspaper together at home, Remus asking the occasional question, and soon enough Sirius only spoke to him in French, presumably to annoy him.

It helped whenever he had to leave the house, though, to get food or to do the part time work he had picked up — he tutored English privately, giving his absences months in advance, claiming he had to travel for his other work. No one saw him around during the week after the full moon anyway, so it worked well enough as an excuse.

It felt, however impossibly, like this could work — that they could have this, despite everything. Sirius laughed like Remus hadn’t seen in years when he discovered that Harry was using the threat of his wanted felon godfather against the Dursleys even though he knew it was absolutely impossible for Sirius to follow through. Remus felt genuinely useful for the first time outside of his brief stint at Hogwarts. Life was — dare he say it — good.

He came back from the shops one afternoon in late August with some taro, which had been on sale, and a recipe to try. They had had to expand their diet significantly, this far away from the tourist areas that catered to more Western tastes, but Sirius was used to eating almost anything, and it was Remus that held them back from taking advantage of the variety of local produce. He had a good feeling about the taro, though.

He opened the door to find things just slightly off, and froze in the doorway, certain that the nightmares he’d only just stopped having about returning home to find Sirius gone had become true. “Snuffles?” he called, closing the door and going to the living room, getting his wand from the hidden compartment in the coffee table.

There was no answer, but there was sound from the bedroom, so he cautiously approached, his wand held high. If it ended up being a Muggle he could just Obliviate them — but if it were a wizard, he was going to go down fighting.

He found Sirius in human form, rummaging through drawers.

“Sirius? What’s wrong?” Sirius was supposed to stay in dog form when Remus was out of the house — it was by far the safest option, and they hadn’t been on Tahiti long enough to fall into bad habits yet.

“I’m going back — Harry needs me.”

“What?”

“He wrote saying his scars hurts, and—”

“And what, you decided that getting arrested was the best course of action?”

“Of course I’m not going to get arrested,” Sirius said dismissively, apparently refusing to actually turn around and look Remus in the face.

“Sorry, I thought you said you were going to go back to — where, to Hogwarts? Are you mad?”

“I won’t be going to Hogwarts, I can stay in the mountains — we can meet in Hogsmeade or something.”

“Oh, of course, the only wizarding village in the entire bloody country is the perfect place to not get arrested, forgive me.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“It won’t! Why — look at me, Sirius.” Remus grabbed Sirius’s arm and pulled until Sirius finally looked up.

His eyes were wild, and he put Remus in mind of a cornered animal.

“What did Harry say?”

“It’s over on the — over there,” Sirius said, using the arm Remus did not currently have a death grip on to wave in the direction of the bed.

Remus let go of him to read the letter. It was concerning, certainly — it was unlikely that that Harry’s scar pain was some kind of harmless aftershock, and at the very least Dumbledore should be informed about it — but it wasn’t something they could do anything _about_. Not until Sirius was confirmed an innocent man in the eyes of the law.

“And how, exactly, do you intend on helping him?”

“I can — I can listen to him, I can tell Dumbledore, I can protect him if anything—”

“You can’t, though. You can tell Dumbledore, but you can tell Dumbledore and stay here. You won’t be able to protect him — what, will Death Eaters come to Hogwarts in plain view and murder him, now that they’ve known exactly where he is all school year for over three years now? He goes to school with Lucius Malfoy’s son, Padfoot! They know where he is and they haven’t touched him.”

“Oh, sure, so just because nothing’s gone wrong yet I can stop worrying, that’s absolutely wonderful. I’m so glad Voldemort’s definitely dead and Peter is going to do something perfectly innocuous and benign.”

“There’s nothing we can do!”

“There’s got to be something, and I’m not about to sit here pretty on the other side of the world doing absolutely nothing while my godson is in danger. I’m not going to betray James and Lily again. You don’t have to come with me.” Implicit was the _you can betray them_.

“I—”

Remus was taken aback for a second, the breath knocked out of him. He tried to imagine a future without Sirius and he couldn’t — he hadn’t realised but Sirius had become his entire world, here on this tiny island where he wasn’t an object of pity for the first time in his life. It wasn’t just that he didn’t have to worry about where his next meal was coming from — it was being able to come home to someone, to have someone comfort him when he woke up in the middle of the night, to not have to face the rising full moon with the terror of being completely alone.

“Do I mean that little, then?” Remus said at last, the thinness of his voice betraying how much Sirius’s words had stung him; he had, apparently, fallen out of practice as far as guarding his emotions went.

“You know that’s not what this is about,” Sirius replied, actually looking Remus in the eye properly this time. “I don’t _want_ to go, it’s — I have to. I can’t stay.”

He closed the bag he had been filling, and his eyes flicked towards the door. When he made to walk out, though, Remus stepped in front of him.

“Sirius,” he said pleadingly, hardly caring that he was begging. “Don’t.”

Sirius paused for a moment, and sighed, his eyes leaving the hallway to roam over Remus’s face. He looked less manic, now — now he just looked tired, and older than he really was.

“Moony,” he said, and something inside of Remus crumbled to pieces. Before he even knew what he was doing, he cupped Sirius’s face in his hands and kissed him. To his surprise, Sirius kissed back — he’d half expected to be pushed away, discarded in the face of Sirius’s desperate desire to do something monumentally stupid.

Kissing Sirius wasn’t exactly something he’d dwelled on — in the last few months, he’d mostly spent his time trying _not_ to think about it, because the consequences of going through with his idle wishes were far too steep. The real deal was a lot like he had tried not to imagine: hurried, a little rough, with the edge of desperation that he thought he could almost taste.

“I can’t just — don’t you understand?” Sirius said when he pulled back, but his hand was still cradling the back of Remus’s head, and he hadn’t put any space between them. They were nonsense words, and yet — that’s what decades had given them. The ability to understand even the things they couldn’t say.

“If you have to, then I’ll come with you, but if you do it in a rush without thinking it through then all you’ll do is let Harry down,” Remus said, shaking his head to try to get rid of the distraction of the way his lips tingled, of the part of his brain that was doing cartwheels. “You’ll be less use to him in Azkaban than on Tahiti. I know it seems urgent, but — please, we won’t be able to leave until tomorrow anyway. Let me help, and we can go back together.”

He was hoping, perhaps against hope, that Sirius would melt into his arms, and they could spend one last night together in comfort and safety before they had to leave. But his whole body was tense, and he wouldn’t meet Remus’s gaze.

“I’ve already let him down so much,” he said in a low voice. “I’m just — afraid I’m going to do it again. If I could, I would stay here with you — you know that, right?”

“I know,” Remus said, although he privately couldn’t help but wonder. He did, however, voice the other thought that was on his mind, one that he’d been avoiding saying out loud for the last several weeks. “It’s not — it wasn’t all your fault. _I_ let _you_ down. I let you go to Azkaban the first time, without so much as a trial — I just believed you would have murdered your dearest friend and — I’m not going to let it happen again.”

To Remus’s surprise, Sirius huffed out a laugh. “In all fairness, I hadn’t given you much reason to trust me. And I was stupid enough to not trust you.”

“I wasn’t terribly trustworthy,” Remus said, “what with the disappearing for weeks at a time and refusing to tell you where I’d been. But it’s different, now. Everything’s different, and we were up against the wall back then, with no certainties, no guarantee that we’d live to see next week. We don’t have to live like that. Even if — even when we go back.”

At last, Sirius let out a breath and stepped away. Remus felt the loss of him already. “Right,” he said, in a tone that betrayed his disbelief. “You’re right. We’ll do better this time.”

Remus wasn’t sure how to fix this — there _was_ no sensible plan for going back to Scotland, because going back to Scotland was a terrible idea. But being a Marauder was about eighty percent terrible ideas and always had been — being friends with a werewolf, becoming animagi, the constant pranks that skirted expulsion more than once. Joining a secret resistance group in a deadly war was just par for the course, and so, to some extent, was this.

“I can’t believe we’ll have to abandon this place too,” Remus said at last, attempting a smile. “We’ll never get the deposit back.”

Sirius laughed, and kissed him, and however the future looked, they would have this. Maybe that would have to be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> frankly, congratulations to me for finishing this despite the absolutely massive depression i have at the moment. does it have any actual merit? who knows, it is finished.


End file.
